SPRINGFIELD — The jobless are still having a hard time navigating the state’s automated unemployment claims system despite two months of trial and error and the state’s best efforts to smooth their way .

“There are so many questions, it's difficult to understand,” said Sol Arias, a Springfield woman who tried claiming unemployment this summer after being laid off from her job as a school bus driver in the city. “Each form is the same questions, but with different words each time. You keep going in circles and they keep telling you they can’t help you.”

She said efforts to talk to a live operator or meet with someone in person at FutureWorks, a one-stop career center in Springfield, ended only in frustration. The whole process basically ended this week when she went back to work as school resumed.

“I tell them my electricity is about to be shut off,” Arias said. “All I get back is, 'Well, I can’t help you.'"

Other unemployment insurance claimants report filling out and clicking through a computerized questionnaire only to be told that it didn’t take, then being sent something in the mail, or calling on the phone only to get an endless computerized loop or a fast busy signal.

“Largely, the system is working,” Goldstein said. “That being said, even if one person is having problems, that is one person too many. If anyone is having problems, we’d like to address them.”

But Goldstein also said in a series of interviews this week that the new system is designed to efficiently weed out claimants for adjudication, either because the former employers are contesting the reason for termination or because the claimants themselves have something out of the ordinary about the claim.

That could be a failure to show that they are looking for work or part-time income which complicates the unemployment benefit.

Instituted in early July, the new automated system is the second phase in a $46 million technology upgrade launched in 2009.

Since the launch of UI Online, 47,720 initial claims have been filed and 60 percent of these claims were done through the new system without any staff assistance, Goldstein said.

State unemployment workers answer about 5,000 calls each day and the vast majority of calls are now focused on customer assistance rather than claims-taking.

For the week ending Aug. 24, approximately 97 percent of claimants requesting continued weekly claims were using the self-service modules including the Internet and automated phone options through UI Online and this has been a consistent trend since the launch of the new system. For the same week, system users processed more 115,000 weekly unemployment insurance extension requests, 97 percent of them doing so on their own either by phone or on the website, http://www.mass.gov/lwd/unemployment-insur/.

Goldstein said the state has advertised for 20 more temporary claims workers, emphasizing Spanish skills. That is on top of 20 temporary hired immediately after the system was implemented and 60 hired in advance of the new computer system on top of a pre-changeover staff of 150 who took many more claims with a personal phone call.

Goldstein said the new system will save $10 million to $15 million a year when it is up and running, including $1 million a year in postage alone. Some of the savings will come in eliminating claims that never should have been paid.